The soaring cost of Canada’s housing has become a major political problem for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as his chief rival zeros in on generational grievances over affordability.
Trudeau has played defense on the issue this summer, appointing a new housing minister last week and shifting some of the blame to other levels of government on Monday. But with his party already sinking in recent polls, housing has become a serious vulnerability for Trudeau.
“Failure to be seen as doing enough on housing could be politically disastrous for the Liberals,” said David Coletto, chief executive officer of polling firm Abacus Data.
The issue is particularly important for Canadians under 40 years old — a critically important demographic that Trudeau’s party couldn’t have won the last two elections without, Coletto said. His firm’s most recent poll put Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives 10 points ahead of the Liberals.
The benchmark price for a Canadian home has more than doubled over the past decade, reaching $760,600 (US$572,470) in June. Trudeau’s government, which took power in 2015, has also steadily raised its annual immigration targets, with more than one million people arriving last year, straining an already tight housing supply.
Poilievre has hammered Trudeau on the issue, focusing on the anger of younger generations. Canada’s housing affordability is among the worst in the world, he told reporters Tuesday outside the Parliament building in Ottawa.
“Rent has doubled,” he said. “Mortgage payments, doubled. Needed down payments, doubled. All after eight years of Justin Trudeau.”
To be sure, skyrocketing housing costs have many causes beyond Trudeau’s control. Provinces and cities — responsible for land-use planning, zoning and permitting — bear some of the blame, as do real estate investors, foreign buyers, years of rock-bottom interest rates and other factors.
Still, Canada’s ambitious immigration targets have outpaced home building, aggravating the imbalance between demand and supply. In the 12 months to March, 4 to 5 international migrants arrived in Canada for every newly started unit of housing construction. That’s the highest ratio of new Canadians to new homes on record in data going back to 1977.
Poilievre, however, repeatedly sidestepped reporters’ questions on Tuesday about whether he would reduce immigration targets.
Former Liberal lawmaker Adam Vaughan, who helped craft Trudeau’s $82 billion national housing strategy released in 2017, argued the country is better off today than it would have been without his party’s policies. If it had done nothing, federal spending for social housing this year would have been just $1 billion, he said.
However, more needs to be done, and time would be better spent focusing on solutions across levels of government than laying blame, he said. Trudeau’s comment on Monday that housing isn’t a primary federal responsibility was “problematic,” Vaughan said.
“It is a responsibility of the federal government, if not literally then it is politically, and I would argue that it is morally,” said Vaughan, who now works at public relations firm Navigator.
The federal government has a range of tools it could use to address the housing shortage without swelling its debt, said Mike Moffatt, senior policy and innovation director at the Smart Prosperity Institute.
Those measures include targeting immigration policy toward construction workers, electricians and others who could boost housing supply and slowing down international student visa approvals until provinces require universities to build more housing for them.
If the government is going to act, “they better do so quickly because time’s not on their side, and there’s a chance that one of the opposition parties could really start to own this issue,” Moffatt said.
Marci Surkes, who formerly worked as Trudeau’s policy director, said she suspects the government is working on a housing plan as a central plank of its fall budget update.
“This should be ground that the Liberal Party should be occupying and owning,” said Surkes, who now works as an adviser to the Compass Rose Group. “They should have been making progress that was feeling more tangible at this point. And yet the circumstances being what they are economically, whatever progress has been made to date certainly doesn’t feel like enough.”
New Democratic Party Leader Jagmeet Singh, whose party has agreed to prop up the Liberal minority government in Parliament, said on Tuesday that Trudeau’s “finger-pointing” isn’t going to solve the housing issue, even though all orders of government hold some responsibility.
“We can’t ignore significant levers that the federal government has,” he said. “The levers are so significant that I would say the federal government has incredible powers to actually solve this problem if they choose to do so.”
WINNIPEG – The federal New Democrats have kept a longtime stronghold in the Elmwood-Transcona riding in Winnipeg.
The NDP’s Leila Dance won a close battle over Conservative candidate Colin Reynolds, and says the community has spoken in favour of priorities such as health care and the cost of living.
Elmwood-Transcona has elected a New Democrat in every election except one since the riding was formed in 1988.
The seat became open after three-term member of Parliament Daniel Blaikie resigned in March to take a job with the Manitoba government.
A political analyst the NDP is likely relieved to have kept the seat in what has been one of their strongest urban areas.
Christopher Adams, an adjunct professor of political studies at the University of Manitoba, says NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh worked hard to keep the seat in a tight race.
“He made a number of visits to Winnipeg, so if they had lost this riding it would have been disastrous for the NDP,” Adams said.
The strong Conservative showing should put wind in that party’s sails, Adams added, as their percentage of the popular vote in Elmwood-Transcona jumped sharply from the 2021 election.
“Even though the Conservatives lost this (byelection), they should walk away from it feeling pretty good.”
Dance told reporters Monday night she wants to focus on issues such as the cost of living while working in Ottawa.
“We used to be able to buy a cart of groceries for a hundred dollars and now it’s two small bags. That is something that will affect everyone in this riding,” Dance said.
Liberal candidate Ian MacIntyre placed a distant third,
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 16, 2024
OTTAWA – Prime Minister Justin Trudeau say the Liberals have “all sorts of reflections” to make after losing a second stronghold in a byelection in Montreal Monday night.
His comments come as the Liberal cabinet gathers for its first regularly scheduled meeting of the fall sitting of Parliament, which began Monday.
Trudeau’s Liberals were hopeful they could retain the Montreal riding of LaSalle—Émard—Verdun, but those hopes were dashed after the Bloc Québécois won it in an extremely tight three-way race with the NDP.
Louis-Philippe Sauvé, an administrator at the Institute for Research in Contemporary Economics, beat Liberal candidate Laura Palestini by less than 250 votes. The NDP finished about 600 votes back of the winner.
It is the second time in three months that Trudeau’s party lost a stronghold in a byelection. In June, the Conservatives defeated the Liberals narrowly in Toronto-St. Paul’s.
The Liberals won every seat in Toronto and almost every seat on the Island of Montreal in the last election, and losing a seat in both places has laid bare just how low the party has fallen in the polls.
“Obviously, it would have been nicer to be able to win and hold (the Montreal riding), but there’s more work to do and we’re going to stay focused on doing it,” Trudeau told reporters ahead of this morning’s cabinet meeting.
When asked what went wrong for his party, Trudeau responded “I think there’s all sorts of reflections to take on that.”
In French, he would not say if this result puts his leadership in question, instead saying his team has lots of work to do.
Bloc leader Yves-François Blanchet will hold a press conference this morning, but has already said the results are significant for his party.
“The victory is historic and all of Quebec will speak with a stronger voice in Ottawa,” Blanchet wrote on X, shortly after the winner was declared.
NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh and his party had hoped to ride to a win in Montreal on the popularity of their candidate, city councillor Craig Sauvé, and use it to further their goal of replacing the Liberals as the chief alternative to the Conservatives.
The NDP did hold on to a seat in Winnipeg in a tight race with the Conservatives, but the results in Elmwood-Transcona Monday were far tighter than in the last several elections. NDP candidate Leila Dance defeated Conservative Colin Reynolds by about 1,200 votes.
Singh called it a “big victory.”
“Our movement is growing — and we’re going to keep working for Canadians and building that movement to stop Conservative cuts before they start,” he said on social media.
“Big corporations have had their governments. It’s the people’s time.”
New Democrats recently pulled out of their political pact with the government in a bid to distance themselves from the Liberals, making the prospects of a snap election far more likely.
Trudeau attempted to calm his caucus at their fall retreat in Nanaimo, B.C, last week, and brought former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney on as an economic adviser in a bid to shore up some credibility with voters.
The latest byelection loss will put more pressure on him as leader, with many polls suggesting voter anger is more directed at Trudeau himself than at Liberal policies.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 17, 2024.
The New Democrats have declared a federal byelection victory in their Winnipeg stronghold riding of Elmwood—Transcona.
The NDP candidate Leila Dance told supporters in a tearful speech that even though the final results weren’t in, she expected she would see them in Ottawa.
With several polls still to be counted, Conservative candidate Colin Reynolds conceded defeat and told his volunteers that they should be proud of what the Conservatives accomplished in the campaign.
Political watchers had a keen eye on the results to see if the Tories could sway traditionally NDP voters on issues related to labour and affordability.
Meanwhile in the byelection race in the Montreal riding of LaSalle—Émard—Verdun the NDP, Liberals and Bloc Québécois remained locked in an extremely tight three-way race as the results trickled in slowly.
The Liberal stronghold riding had a record 91 names on the ballot, and the results aren’t expected until the early hours of the morning.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 16, 2024.
